Pope Benedict XVI would have
created quite the brouhaha during his trip to Great Britain in September 2010
had he demanded return of the monasteries and other properties stolen from the
Church in the sixteenth century.

In that century,
land was the primary source of wealth and political power. At the dawn of that century,
the Church, through its cathedrals, parishes, hospitals, colleges, monasteries,
and other embodiments, owned perhaps one-third of the acreage in England, more
even than the Crown. Much of the Church’s income was used for aid to the needy,
care of the sick, help for travelers, provision against poor harvest, and
education.

In 1528, while
King Henry VIII, the second Tudor monarch, was embroiled in his “great matter,”
trying to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Argon, Cardinal
Wolsey obtained papal permission to suppress – or shut – twenty-nine small
monasteries and to devote their incomes to endowment of a college at Oxford. To
implement the closure and diversion of funds, Wolsey chose Thomas Cromwell, a
lawyer. When Wolsey fell out of favor with the king soon thereafter, Cromwell
opined that the cardinal’s agreement with the pope violated English law; ergo,
the revenues of the suppressed monasteries inexplicably belonged to the Crown.

In the
mid-1530s, emboldened by Henry VIII’s domination of the church in England,
Cromwell launched visitations of the monasteries, harassing them and their
administrators. “Money fell into his coffers from terrified abbeys and priories
hoping to buy their way out of destruction, from people eager to buy their way
into the leadership of abbeys and priories and thereby gain control of their
assets, and from his own agents as they moved across the country shaking down
their victims and taking care to send their master a share of the booty,”
writes G. J. Meyer in The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most
Notorious Dynasty. In March 1536, Parliament authorized the seizure and
closing of all smaller monasteries, with Cromwell claiming their property and
income for the Crown while diverting some of the windfall into his and his
henchmen’s own hands.

By
April fat trunks were being hauled into London filled with gold and silver
plate, jewelry, and other treasures accumulated by the monasteries over the
centuries. With them came money from the sale of church bells, lead stripped
from the roofs of monastic buildings, and livestock, furnishings, and
equipment. Some of the confiscated land was sold – enough to bring in £30,000 – and what was
not sold generated tens of thousands of pounds in annual rents. The longer the
confiscations continued, the smaller the possibility of their ever being
reversed or even stopped from going further.The money was spent almost as quickly as it flooded in – so
quickly that any attempt to restore the monasteries to what they had been
before the suppression would have meant financial ruin for the Crown. Nor would
those involved in the work of the suppression … ever be willing to part with
what they were skimming off for themselves.

Thousands of
people were left to shift for themselves as monks, nuns, and their servants,
dependents, and tenants were displaced. “A new kind of pauperism was being
created across England as a direct consequence of the actions of the king. … It
would plague the reigns of Henry’s children.”

Once the smaller
monasteries were closed, the Crown turned to the larger, richer ones. Though
Parliament had not passed a law permitting confiscation of their assets, most
of those houses, aware of the monks the Crown had already killed and that a
similar fate awaited them if they balked, did not resist. Thus their lands,
buildings, and accumulated treasures became the Crown’s. In May, 1539
Parliament’s passage of the Second Act of Dissolution

declared all the church property confiscated since
1536 (when the smaller houses were condemned) and all church property tobe confiscated in the future to be
lawfully the property of the Crown. This statute remedied an awkward legal flaw
in the surrenders signed by the leaders of the larger houses: those leaders
were not the owners of the monasteries they headed and had no right to give
them away. It speeded the completion of the greatest redistribution of English
land and wealth since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The whole suppression worked
to the direct and immediate advantage of the king, who rather abruptly became
richer than any other monarch in Christendom. By the spring of 1540 not a
single monastic establishment remained in existence in England or Wales.
Hundreds if not thousands of the monks and nuns expelled from them had become
itinerant beggars, wandering from village to village in search of work or
charity. The number of England’s schools, hospitals, and institutions for the
care of the aged and indigent had undergone an abrupt collapse from which it
would not recover for centuries.

Henry also ordered the
destruction of the shrines of England, most famously Thomas Becket’s tomb at
Canterbury, and delivery of their treasures to the Crown – twenty-four
wagonloads, along with two chests laden with jewels, from Becket’s tomb alone.

Under Henry
VIII, “the institutions of government became tools of the plunderers, and their
aim, when it was not to pull in still more plunder, was to make sure that no
one threatened the bounty that Henry’s revolution had funneled to them.” Upon
Henry’s death, those closest to him in his last days claimed new titles and
riches for themselves, declaring them “unfulfilled gifts” Henry would have
bestowed if he had lived.

His son Edward,
a child of nine who was tutored to be stridently evangelical and anti-Catholic,
succeeded Henry. The king’s position as supreme head of the church “now meant
much more than separation from Rome. Now it was a tool to be used in the
destruction of almost everything that remained of the old religion.” By statute,
endowments of chantries (small chapels established for offering prayers for the
dead) and assets of guilds that provided burial insurance and funded schools
and charitable activities were transferred to the Crown. (Also by statute,
anyone found guilty of vagrancy could be branded and enslaved.) Then the Crown
confiscated most endowments of the dioceses.

Edward VI died
in his mid-teens. The next Tudor, Catherine of Aragon’s Roman Catholic daughter
Mary, raised an army to claim the throne, convinced she must restore the true
faith to England. But she avoided one area: “there was no possibility of
returning” the land stolen from the Church; “any move in that direction would
spark a reaction so violent as to wreck any possibility of progress on other fronts.”
Pope Julius II agreed. “Parliament, both of its houses dominated by exactly the
kinds of men who had prospered mightily from the dispersion of the church land,
was relieved to find that Mary was doing nothing about the subject.” Indeed,
Parliament “asked the Crown to petition … for the restoration of the ancient
connection to Rome. Yet, again great care was taken, first by Parliament in its
entreaty and then by the queen … to make clear that there could be no question
of restoring the church’s lost property; obviously this remained an issue of
the most extreme sensitivity.” The plunderers kept their booty but the Roman
Catholic Church reclaimed England. “It was all quite astonishing. The schism,
the Reformation, had been reversed with almost no resistance and no shedding of
blood.”

Soon after the
formal reunion with Rome, Paul IV became pope. He quickly issued a general
condemnation of the confiscation of Church property; but, though combative, he
also declared that the houses suppressed by Henry VIII no longer existed and
that new houses established under Mary had no claim to property taken from the
suppressed houses, thus supporting Mary’s position that there would not be a
restoration of land taken from the Church.

Mary died at 42
after reigning only five years. “The English Counter-Reformation was dead too.”
Her successor, Elizabeth, the last Tudor, was militantly Protestant. For ten
years, though, she was content to inconvenience Catholics, hoping their numbers
would whither. But when Pope Pius V excommunicated her in the hope of securing
the throne for Mary, Queen of Scots, through whom he believed England would
again be restored to the Church, “intense persecution followed swiftly.” The
issue of restoration of Church property was far from anyone’s mind. Indeed,
seizing Catholic property through piracy directed at Spanish ships became
England’s officially denied policy. And recusant Roman Catholics in England
were fined “a sum so impossible for most subjects as to be no different from
confiscation.”

Over time the
plunderers covered their booty with a veneer of civility. “If it took two
centuries to turn the descendants of looters and speculators into the ladies
and gentlemen of Jane Austen’s novels,” writes Meyer, “for the lucky few the
transformation was as agreeable as it was prolonged.”

The Tudors not only robbed the Church of its property. Henry, Edward,
and Elizabeth also robbed England of its Catholic faith. When Benedict XVI
visited England, he, like his predecessors Julius II and Paul IV, forewent any
attempt to reclaim the property stolen from the Church. Instead, he went in
search of something more precious: souls. And he was rewarded with a subsequent
infusion of Anglicans – including Anglican bishops – into the Church.

The Tudors adopts neither a
particularly Catholic perspective nor a particularly anti-Catholic perspective
to tell the story of the family of monarchs that ruled England from 1485 to
1603. Instead, it asks the reader to put aside modern prejudices so as to
understand sixteenth century England: “Perhaps the most alien thing about
England of the sixteenth century, from a twenty-first-century perspective, is
the extent to which almost the whole population believed – really believed
– what the church taught,” writes Meyer. “Few things could be more foreign to
the sensibilities of the world we live in now.”

G. J Meyer’s The
Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty is a vivid
retelling of an era that still fascinates, some four hundred years after its
end. The stakes are high: souls, riches, the faith of a nation, national
greatness, and the unity of Christendom. The characters are striking: Henry
VIII, Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, Cranmer, Rich, Wolsey, More, Mary, Queen of Scots,
Elizabeth, Drake, Cecil, Walsingham, Campion, Philip II, and many more. And the
methods are often brutal: hanging, drawing, and quartering, rape, torture,
incarceration without charges, and establishment of a spy system and police
state.

The Tudors is a very readable popular
history that revels in dispelling myths.

Was Henry VIII
an insatiable devourer of women? Not so. Anne Boleyn mocked his performance in
bed, and he probably was incapable of consummating more than half of his
marriages.

Was Elizabeth
“part saint and part goddess”? Hardly. “Elizabeth, toward the end of her reign,
was not the Gloriana of legend but a haggard, evil-tempered and pathetic crone,
easy prey for any young courtier willing to praise her nonexistent beauty and
profess undying love.”

Was the Tudor
era, particularly the Elizabethan age, England’s zenith, “home of a uniquely
free, prosperous, and happy people”? Nope. “In fact, what most of the people of
England got from the Tudors was disruption, oppression, loss, and pain. … In
1590, a century after the first Tudor capture of the throne, England’s standard
of living was lower than it had been 250 years before.”

Did Henry VIII
liberate the English, who had been chafing under the rule of the oppressive
Church of Rome?

Anyone relying
on movies and television for a depiction of England’s bishops and abbots before
the Reformation could come to no other conclusion than that their lives were
devoted to oppression and denial, to forcing obedience to the most rigid
orthodoxy on an unwilling but impotent people and crushing any departure from
discredited ways of thinking. But it becomes clear, when one looks closely,
that life in England before the 1530s could not have felt like that at all –
certainly not for the vast majority of people. … The documentary record – even
the archaeological record – suggests that the people of England were strongly
attached to their church in Henry VIII’s time. … England was not intensely
anticlerical or anything of the kind. … England was not simply formally
Catholic, affiliated officially with Rome; it was a deeply Catholic culture.

Of course, this
debunking of mythology raises obvious questions. Why did such myths arise? Why
do they persist?

“Though there
was no way to deny his awfulness, throughout the English-speaking (and Protestant)
world it remained impossible to condemn him outright,” the book explains,
referring to Henry VIII; “to do so would be to bring into question the English
Reformation and – what continued to matter most – the legitimacy of the people
who now owned and governed the empire.”

This of course
leads to the Whig theory of history, “according to which everything that had
happened was to be celebrated because all of it was part of the (divinely
ordained?) process by which England had ascended inexorably to greatness.
Membership in this school required believing that the English were fortunate –
and had also always been grateful, most of them – to be rid of everything the
Tudors had cast aside.”

Or to put it
differently, when plunders write history, they create a myth of their own
greatness, celebrating those who championed and facilitated their plundering
while castigating those they robbed.